


Untitled

by websandwhiskers



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: AU, Allusion to Rape, Angst, Dark, Fusion, Gore, Mental Illness, Multi, PTSD, Suicide, Trauma, abusive parent/child relationship, age gap, and a partridge in a pear tree, cannibalism (but not quite like in the show), did I mention dark?, having fun with how circumstances shape personality, manipulation and mind games, no really dark, ooc
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-10-11
Packaged: 2017-12-23 13:11:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 19,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/websandwhiskers/pseuds/websandwhiskers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal / Hunger Games fusion; Hannibal characters as past victors / tributes in the Quarter Quell.  Everybody's a killer, here (except Will Graham).  Nobody's a serial killer (except Garrett Jacob Hobbs).<br/>The Games break everyone, and then being a victor subject to the Capital's whims breaks them more.<br/>Will Graham is different, and that changes everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Crumbs

On the reaping day of the Quarter Quell, Abigail’s mother cuts her own throat. 

She does it on the front porch, in front of everyone.  It’s early morning, and the streets are busy.  Her blood splatters half a dozen people.

Abigail stands there in shock, staring, choking, gasping for air.  The phantom smell of cold floods her nostrils at the sight of the blood.  Cold ought not to have a smell at all, but it did.  Her games had been a frozen tundra.  The blood had been very stark against the snow.

Her mother’s blood gushes down her neck in a thick, solid stripe.  The cut was deep, sure, unwavering. 

Her father’s hand grabs her arm, clutching painfully tight.

 _Don’t,_ Abigail thinks, as her mother falls – folds.  It’s slow, almost graceful until the seizure starts. 

_Don’t give me bruises.   I’m going to need that arm._

Someone is screaming, but it isn’t her.  She thinks maybe she ought to be screaming, or crying, or reacting somehow – but everything in her head has narrowed down to the struggle for air and that point of pain just above her elbow.  She can feel eyes on her, not only her father’s – but his first, most.  He’s watching her, not her mother.  He’s already written her mother off.  She knows this like she knows gravity.

***

Will Graham was last year’s victor, and he did this to them.  He did the impossible and, thus, the unforgivable.

Will was reaped at eighteen, but he was thin and unwell and stammered and twitched in interviews.  He wouldn’t look at the cameras.  He was attractive, enough so that his team had tried to make something of that, but it hadn’t really worked.  He was awkward in his lean body, kept his pretty face down.  He was rated a two.  No one thought he’d survive the first day. 

***

Abigail jerks her arm free.  She falls to her knees.  Her mother’s blood is hot and slippery and everywhere, on her hands, her skirt.  She’s leaving bloody handprints on her mother’s shoulders.

“Mom?”  Her mother is still seizing, her body unwilling to surrender just yet, though her eyes are already blank.  Abigail shakes her and her head lolls, the cut to her throat gaping.  “Mom – Mom!” 

She’s gone.  She’s already gone.  Abigail knows this. 

“Abigail.”  Her father’s voice is sharp, urgent, laced through with panic – she knows why.  It has nothing to do with the woman bleeding out on his front step. 

“Mom?”  She’s not crying; should she be crying?  Her mother isn’t quite dead yet. 

“Abigail!”

She’s showing weakness.

Abigail stands, and staggers backward and turns out to face the crowd, red-smeared hands held out in front of her like foreign things whose use she has forgotten.  Her eyes jerk and dance from face to accusing face, her lips pulled back in a cry that isn’t coming.  There’s no sound – a wide circle of quiet around them, though at the edges it’s buzzing, word passing.  Whoever was screaming, they’ve stopped now.

Her father watches her, assessing; he stands still as stone and yet something about him says _twitchy_ to her.  Anxious.  Grasping. 

She’d known she might die, when she volunteered two Games ago, but that hadn’t made it any more of a choice.  She was going to die if she didn’t volunteer, and the idea of it happening elsewhere, at the hand of some stranger, in some unpredictable way, was almost appealing.  Not enough for her to let it happen, but enough to keep the fear close and familiar and manageable.

He’d always meant for her to volunteer – had trained her, shaped and molded her; the Shrike’s daughter.  That was what they called her.  She didn’t even get her own name. 

***

Will Graham came from District 4, but he was not a Career.  District 4 had high hopes for its female contender last year, and intended to provide her no unnecessary competition.  No male Career volunteered, and Will was reaped. 

When his name was called he stood still, blinking, as the crowd gradually parted around him, revealing his stunned face to the cameras. 

A younger boy shoved him toward the stage.  He stumbled a single step, and stopped, and looked around in confusion.  Twelve Districts and the Capital watched Will Graham come to grips with what had happened, watched it play out on his face – a prey-animal panic that disintegrated into despair, nodding his head to no one, collecting himself by perceptible inches.  The Peacekeepers had started to push through the crowd toward him by the time Will resolved the inevitability of it, but he made his way forward without them.  The crowd made a wide path for him.  He stepped onto the stage with his jaw set and his chin up. 

It was not the walk of someone going into a fight; it was the walk of someone ascending the gallows.

The female tribute – Miriam Lass – gave him a wry, apologetic sort of smile.  He tried to smile back, but it came out lopsided and wrong and ended in Will averting his face in hasty, jerking movements.  He didn’t lift his eyes again. 

***

Abigail and her father are allowed to go back into the house for a few moments while the Peacekeepers take her mother’s body away.  There can’t be a funeral today; it’s reaping day, and despite the small pool of potential tributes, the entire District is still expected to make an appearance. 

Abigail washes her face and her hands and gets a drink of water and goes to cut a slice of bread, something to settle her stomach, when it occurs to her that no one will be coming back to this house again – not for weeks, possibly not ever.  There will be no funeral tomorrow, either.  They won’t be here tomorrow. 

She puts the knife down and rips the crust back with her fingers and gouges out the pale center of the loaf.   The hand that brings white chunks of bread to her lips shakes.  There is still a faint hint of rust under her nails. 

“Abigail?”

“Just a minute!” Abigail calls back, and eats another bite of the soft bread.  It isn’t helping her nausea.  Her shaking is getting worse.  Half the loaf is gone already, but she doesn’t want to stop.  The house is perfect, she realizes; she’d thought her mother was cleaning so much just to keep busy, to keep from thinking about it, but that wasn’t it.  She wasn’t cleaning for them – she was cleaning for the new family, the other people who will live here now, when they’re gone. 

Breadcrumbs drop from her fingers.

“Abigail!” 

She doesn’t answer this time. 

Making him nervous isn’t a good idea, but she doesn’t think he’d do it here, now.  It’s different than it was, though; she’s nineteen, nearly twenty.  The chance of her being taken against his will, taken out of his control, ought to have been gone.  He doesn’t have a plan for this, and she’s out of alternatives. 

It’s possible he’ll help her win again – maybe?  He might.  He might want her to live.

He doesn’t.  He won’t.  She knows he won’t. 

***

This was what no one saw coming about Will Graham; Will Graham saw _everything_ coming.  Not only the other Tributes, but the Game itself.  He never fought, never hunted anything but squirrels, and never stopped being a step ahead and to the side and exactly where he needed to be to survive.  It was like he’d been inside the Gamemaker’s head.

A head that the Gamemaker was rumored to have lost, at the conclusion of the Game. 

Will Graham was the victor of the 74th Hunger Games – and he did it without killing anyone. 

***

This was why Abigail’s mother killed herself: for the 75th Hunger Games, the Quarter Quell, tributes were to be reaped from the existing pool of victors.

District 5 had only two living victors.

Garrett Jacob Hobbs, the Shrike.

And his daughter, Abigail. 

***


	2. Weeds

***

The tributes from District 6 are siblings, though they don’t look it – he’s tall and whip-thin and red-haired.  She’s short and dark-haired and not dissimilar to Abigail herself in build or overall appearance.  All the brother and sister really have in common is their paleness, no doubt the product of spending most of their time underground in train tunnels.  They were reaped three years apart, the girl the year before Abigail.

 (Abigail wonders if she could have gotten past her eighteenth birthday without having to volunteer, if it hadn’t been for Cassie Boyle, who looks so much like her.  Cassie fought with a mindless desperation, a raw viciousness that made Abigail’s father pace in front of the television even after they got home again, replaying it over and over, eyes darting continuously to Abigail.  Her mother started spending a lot of time at the neighbors.) 

District 7’s tributes are husband and wife, both around thirty.  He is a bull of a man, and seems to be made up of equal parts optimism and rage.  She is bitterness incarnate, and walks with the grace of a ghost. 

(It wouldn’t surprise Abigail if Phyllis Crawford - who everyone calls Bella, the Beauty -  won this thing.  She has the eyes of a dead woman already, and the Games reward that.) 

From District 4 there is, of course, Will Graham.  The District had one of the larger pools of living tributes, full of past Careers, but it was Will Graham’s name that came out of the bowl, and no one volunteered to take his place.  His female counterpart is a decade his senior, and still stunning pretty in a sharp sort of way, with red hair in perfect ringlets – Abigail remembers her as a tribute, if only barely, in snatches of childish awe. 

(Phyllis-who-became-Bella, the next year, had been even more lovely – but by then Abigail was just old enough for the horror of it to begin to outweigh the spectacle, and it hadn’t been the same.)

District 8 sent Alana Bloom, who won three years after Freddy, at the unheard-of age of thirteen.  (She, too, is a pale, dark-haired woman who had been a pale, dark-haired girl, and it was after Alana’s victory that Abigail’s father started to watch her differently).  And they sent the man who had mentored her into victory - the Ripper.

Hannibal Lecter's victory came when Abigail was a little more than year old.  She knows more about him than most of the other victors regardless, though they’re not friends; Abigail doesn’t have friends among the other victors.  She attends the Games with her father, and he doesn’t have friends anywhere.  Lecter had been one of the few to even attempt it, though – he’d been politely interested in her the year after her own victory, introducing himself, attempting conversation.  That hadn’t lasted five minutes before her father pulled her away.

Lecter’s Games, like Abigail’s, had been barren and cold. 

Cannibalism wasn’t unheard-of, in those settings – toward the end, when supplies ran out, and desperation set in.  

(Her father’s games had been scorching hot and mountainous; devising the traps, he’d told her, wasn’t hard.  What was difficult was making certain they didn’t kill too quickly.  Dead bodies would be removed, along with whatever they’d been carrying – their supplies, their clothing, their shoes, all wasted.  The trick was to trap them alive.)

Lecter hadn’t scavenged, he’d hunted. (He’d eaten only one of them, the last, but from the beginning he’d stripped them, taking not just the supplies he needed but everything they had and leaving them bare and exposed.)  

Careers only, at first – but then the girl from District 3 had killed the boy from the same district in his sleep, breaking an alliance.  The Ripper went after her, too.  Then the boy from 12, who had allied with the Careers early on; the one whose leg he’d taken along with his coat and his knives.  

The Ripper didn’t form alliances; he hunted alone.  But he also left exquisitely prepared care packages for the tributes he didn’t find arrogant or traitorous - he had more than he needed, for most of the Games (not at the end; but then there was the boy from 12), and he left those supplies he found extraneous in the paths of those he apparently respected.  

Everyone assumed they were bait for traps; they weren’t.  Then, that they were poisoned; they weren’t.  And when he’d run through tributes who offended him, he stopped hunting at all.   

It was about then, Abigail thought, that the Gamemakers must have begun to get nervous about Lecter – they had to have realized they were being mocked. 

He won anyway, and he was the Capital’s ghoulish darling.  Wealthy socialites invited him to prepare dinner parties for them.  (There were whispers about what was served at those dinners – it was meant to be just a morbid joke, shocking in the way the Capital loved, butAbigail had her doubts.  They killed twenty-three children for their amusement every year, why would they stop at killing one more for the sake of a scandalous feast?) 

(Abigail thinks Lecter’s reaping in the Quarter Quell was no more left to chance than Will Graham’s.)

***

Abigail and her father ride their chariot wrapped in copper wires dotted with strategically placed clusters of twinkling lights, their skins painted with geometric lines like a power grid.  Her father looks somewhere between robotic and absurdly festive; the effect skips right over the clever artistry their stylists had intended and hovers at the edge of horror, but ends up being just ill-conceived and disturbing.

She can’t really say how she looks herself, in the same costume – she looks up at herself on the enormous screens and thinks it does nothing so much as make her disappear. 

Will Graham and Freddy Lounds are draped in shimmering sheets and lacey froths of material – water, Abigail thinks, is the pretense.  Crashing waves.

The actual result is something else entirely.  They look unearthly.  Angelic.  Freddy is no such thing, but her face fits the part, and Will –

\- Abigail doesn’t think this is going entirely as the Gamemakers must have intended.  The crowd roars for Will, chants his name, even when the screens refuse to give him the spotlight. 

Alana from District 8 wears wears a simple gown of intricate lace, the ends of her bell sleeves tapering into individual threads that are tied to the tips of the needle-like caps they’ve put on the ends of her fingers, so that she has to stand with her arms slightly extended to give the full effect.  It, like District 4’s pseudo-liquid costumes, is on the surface a fit tribute to her district’s main product, textiles. 

It makes her look like one of the Fates.  She has an ageless sort of face, that has been left entirely unadorned.

Lecter stands beside her in a perfect three-piece suit; there are no threads at his fingers.

His hands, his face, every bit of skin that shows, has been painted a livid blood red.

His fingers are dripping.

 _“Is that dye?  I think that’s meant to be dye, Caesar,”_ says the announcer.

***

“People are scared of your dad.”

Abigail turns to face Beverley Katz, from District 3.  They’re in the training center; no one seems to be doing very much training.  Mostly they’re talking.  Mostly they’re old friends.

“My dad’s scary,” she answers.

“Not that scary,” Beverley counters, unimpressed.  “Scary enough to put a target on his back.”

No one’s going to be sorry to kill him; he isn’t anyone’s old friend.  Neither is she. 

“I’m not scary?” Abigail looks down at the knot she’s tying.  “Or is there a target on my back too?”

“I’m just saying, you stand too close – people miss,” Beverley tells her.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”  Abigail keeps her eyes on the rope between her fingers, and refuses to squirm at the sensation of Beverley’s eyes on her. 

***

She sees Lecter talking to her father from across the room.  She’s throwing knives; they don’t appear to be doing anything but talking.

The conversation lasts less than a minute, but at the end of it her father is tense, his hands trembling, his eyes locked on Lecter’s retreating back.  Abigail puts her knives down and crosses the room to him.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing that matters,” her father says, and gives her a tight smile.  “Warned me.”  He jerks his head at a cluster of people across the room, composed of Will Graham, Alana Bloom, and the Crawfords.

Lecter is walking over to join that group as they speak; there is a reason, Abigail thinks, that her father needed his traps of rope and rocks and sharpened branches to win – a reason he had to watch them from afar.

Abigail won by stealth – by being invisible.  Her father thinks she survived on the skills he taught her intentionally and to that purpose, but that wasn’t his most valuable lesson to her.

“I got that too,” she says.  “The girl from 3.”

(They still say “girl” and “boy”, though none of them are anymore.) 

Her father doesn’t respond in words, not for long moments, but his eyes bore into her.

“I’ll take care of us,” he says.  “And you’re a smart girl, you’ve done this before.  We’ve got this.  You don’t need to worry about any of them.”

“I know,” she says.  “I’m not worried.”

“That’s my girl.”

(I need to worry about _you_ , Abigail thinks.)

***

 She finds him, relatively alone, at the training station devoted to the identification of edible and toxic plants.  Everything is well-labeled, and the trainer – probably feeling sort of pointless – has wandered off. 

If there is one thing in the whole room this man really doesn’t need to practice, it’s got to be finding things to eat, so she suspects he’s there so as to be approachable.  Maybe even to be approached by her, specifically.  That’s probably paranoid, but she can’t shake the thought, and it makes her wonder if this is a bad idea.  She walks up to the station anyway, and puts on a cursory performance of examining the samples arrayed in front of them. 

“You’re winding him up,” Abigail says, voice low and tight. 

“And why would I do that?” Hannibal Lecter answers.

“You’re not going to ask who I mean?”

“Who could you mean but your father?  You hardly speak to anyone else.”

“To rattle him.  Make him sloppy.” 

“I see.”  He doesn’t deny it.  “I do not think you get sloppy, even when rattled, do you, Abigail?”

“No,” she says.  “I don’t.” 

He inclines his head to her at that, the ghost of a smile playing about his lips.  She turns to leave.

“Abigail.”  She stops.

He follows her, closing the few steps of distance she’d put between them, so they’re speaking every bit as intimately as they had been at the station, only now it’s in the open, conspicuous, for everyone (her father) to see. 

She gives him a flat glare, one brow raised. 

His smile blooms into fullness; it makes him look strangely young, which is at once disarming and terrifying.  He tips his head to her again, but it’s different this time.

This isn’t just acknowledgement – this is appreciation. 

It feels like there are three different people in her head, reacting to that – one attracted, one repulsed, and one coldly calculating.  The last wins, as she always does, and files the rest away – her reactions, his reactions, all the scraps she might need later.  Her father taught her that; nothing goes to waste.  Anything can be a weapon.

Lecter is watching her; the admiration in his face hasn’t wavered.  A panicky vulnerability begins to climb in at the edges of her mind, the certainty that he knows her every thought.

That he seems to approve is not reassuring. 

“Your father is unwell, Abigail,” he says, almost gently. 

“You think I don’t know that?” It’s sharper, and louder, than she means it to be.  She can’t see her father, across the room; her back is to him.  Abigail still knows that he’s lifted his head from whatever had previously held his attention, that his eyes are on her. 

“I am quite certain that you do know it,” Lecter continues, softly enough to be for her ears only.  “Better than I can.”

“So.”  She licks her lips, and deliberately lowers her voice, chases the tremble from it.  She brings her chin up.  “So, what?  I should ditch him, join up with you?”

“If you could be so easily persuaded, I would not be interested in persuading you,” Lecter answers, and she’s starting to want to cut that smug expression off his face. 

He sobers, almost the moment she thinks it. 

It sends a flash of queasy cold down her spine, a shiver that settles in her gut and then blooms hot – a visceral recognition that says, at once, _threat,_ and _equal,_ and _your own kind._

“I cannot trust your father, Abigail,” Lecter says, and she knows the words are very carefully chosen, meant to express what he hasn’t said as much as what he has.  He takes her hand, and she lets him, lets her fingers hang there in his like dead weight.  His thumb brushes her knuckles.  It’s a soft gesture, an apology.  Abigail swallows hard.

He lets her hand go and walks away, all crisp economy of movement and lacquered dignity. 

Abigail exhales shakily, and finds that her next breath is as ragged, and the next, panic building like the rumble of an avalanche – and she half expects Lecter to sense it, and turn around.  Three minutes of conversation, and she expects that.

He doesn’t, of course.

She slams her eyes shut and wrenches her body into stillness, clenching her jaw against the shimmer of dizziness that comes and goes when she refuses to gasp for breath the way her lungs demand.  It passes, she’s steady again, she opens her eyes.

Her father is there in front of her.  She doesn’t flinch; she’d known he would be.

“What did he say to you?” her father demands. 

“Nothing important,” Abigail tells him, shrugging and shuddering awkwardly, making a show of distaste.  “Trying to psych me out, I think.”  It’s not really a lie.

Her father is nodding.  “You held it together,” he says, and smiles at her, pleased.  “You looked off-kilter for a minute there, but you didn’t look scared..”  He pauses.  “You can’t get scared, Abigail.  Were you scared?”

“No,” she says – but he’s already going intense in the way that has made her very, very good at not looking scared when she is.

“You can’t – you can never flinch.  _Never_.  You don’t react, you _decide,_ you _choose_ your reaction – or they win.  They make you into an animal, just an animal.  Don’t you _ever_ let them, do you understand?”

“I know,” she says.  “I know, I _didn’t_.” 

“Good.  That’s good.”  His hand comes up to cradle her jaw.  “I know you understand.  You did good, really good.” 

He leans in and kisses her forehead. 

She can feel the way he’s shaking in the stuttering press of his lips to her skin.  


	3. Words

The first girl goes missing when Abigail is only eleven.  Abigail only later adds her to the tally. 

***

The first time around, training and prep and interviews seemed to fly past, too quick, too inconsequential.  Those might have been the last days of her life, and there was no space in them in which to live.  It took her less than half the train ride to realize that this wasn’t what came before the fight for her life, this _was_ the fight for her life – for some ephemeral definition of life in which she wasn’t a product, a possession, their trained dog.  (An animal.) 

***

The next year it’s two, the first three months before the reaping, the second only days in advance.  Like he got nervous. 

Abigail’s name is in the bowl for the first time, but it isn’t called.

***

Now, Abigail wants to scream at them to get on with it.  No one would care, though.  The girl from District 10 already tried that – screaming. 

Her name is Georgia Madchen, and she shrieks and sweeps her arm across the table full of knives.  Spots of red bloom on her sleeve and then run.  For a long moment nearly everyone in the room just freezes, except Georgia, who picks up one of the knives with a hand that is now dripping with her own blood, and Will Graham, who turns away from where he’d been practicing fire-starting and takes three steps towards her, hands out at his sides. 

“Will!” Hannibal Lecter barks out like an order – like he expects Will to understand what he wants despite the absence of any actual instruction.  It’s pretty obvious, Abigail guesses, if you assume Hannibal wants Will alive.  Hannibal clearly wants Will to assume that; whether he expects to be obeyed or the opposite (whether he really wants to preserve Will’s life, or the opposite) she’s less sure.

Regardless, the sound of his voice breaks through the room and shatters whatever had been holding them all.

Several things happen more or less simultaneously.

***

By the time Abigail is fourteen, the pattern is undeniable.

 _You should spend time with Elise,_ he says.  _She’s a smart girl, she’ll be prepared if they call her name.  Get to know her._

_Tell me about her._

And then, two months before the reaping, Elise is gone.  Just vanished.

***

Will ignores Hannibal and keeps walking toward Georgia, murmuring something Abigail is too far away to hear.  The trainer at the knife-throwing station lunges for Georgia, but she slips sideways out of his grasp, still screaming, and runs at Will.  Half the room is running, converging on them much, much too slowly. 

Abigail stays where she stands; she’s too far away, there’s nothing she could do even if she wanted to, and she’s not sure if she should want to or not.  She can feel her father standing just a little behind her like a vibration in the air, something that settles into her bones and wants to shake her to pieces.  He isn’t running either, but that’s hardly surprising.

Georgia swings the knife at Will; he dances back, expressionless, as the blade comes within half an inch of his eyes.  Then Hannibal is there, faster than any of the trainers.  He has the knife out of Georgia’s hands and her arms pinned in a series of tight, efficient motions.  She tries to kick and he takes her to the floor.  It looks effortless; it looks vicious, despite that he’s doing no more than restraining her.  She’s still screaming.

Hannibal’s face is close to hers for a fraction of a second – he whispers something, Abigail thinks. 

“Don’t hurt her!” Will says, stumbling two steps forward and kneeling at Georgia’s head.  “Don’t hurt her, please.”

“I am not harming her,” Hannibal says, and if he’s at all put out at Will’s lack of gratitude, it doesn’t show.  His voice is placating.  “I am keeping her from harming you.” 

 _Harming,_ Abigail thinks, and _hurting_ are two different things.

And then the trainers and half a dozen Peacekeepers are there, taking Georgia – still howling, now mixed with sobbing – away. 

“God, Will,” Alana Bloom mutters, arriving at Will’s back  – she takes his shoulders in hand and spins him, and then her fingers dance across his face before settling on his jaw. 

“I’m fine,” Will says, but he doesn’t move out of her reach.  His face is still unsettlingly unreadable – but not blank.  More like filled with static – too much there to be comprehensible.  They stay like that for long enough to be telling.  Bella Crawford keeps her eyes on the door through which Georgia can still be heard, radiating tightly-wound rage; Jack stands at her side frowning in the same direction.  Hannibal straightens his clothes and then scans the room, utterly composed, assessing.

His gaze lands on Abigail.  She holds it.  _What is your game?_ her lack of an expression asks. 

 _You’ll have to play to find out_ , his equally neutral countenance answers.

“He’ll turn on them,” her father murmurs into her ear.  “Within the first day.”

 _No,_ Abigail thinks, _not that fast._

*** _  
_

 _They weren’t ready,_ he says.  Abigail is sixteen.  _If they’d been reaped - they deserve better than that, they’re not animals.  You’re not an animal, they can’t – I won’t let them turn you into an animal._

No one can touch a victor – her father is much, much too careful to fall prey to some manner of ‘accident’ – but it’s not unnoticed, not anymore.  Stares follow her.  It’s getting harder to do what he asks – to get to know them, gain their trust, learn their habits. 

She ought to be grateful for that, shouldn’t she?  Relieved?  Guilty, at least?  She is.  All of that.  But she’s more afraid than anything else, and fear sharpens her and pares her down.  He never says it’s them or her; he never has to.  That has been the shape of her entire formative existence; the fundamental understanding that sooner or later, in the end, it is always kill or be killed. 

Abigail volunteers.

***

 “Will.” Caesar Flickerman leans forward, elbows on knees, painfully earnest.  Abigail watches this interview as closely as the entire country must.

“They won’t let him out this time,” her father says, at her shoulder.

“I’m watching, shh,” Abigail returns, as much for the way it makes her stomach drop and her heart pound as in an actual desire for quiet.  She can _feel_ the way her father reacts, and it makes everything in her want to turn and smile and apologize, to shrink herself down into a younger, more dependent shape.  And she needs to stop that.  So she listens to Will Graham’s interview.

_Is this what everybody else feels watching him, too?_

“Will,” says Caesar, “It  must feel like you only just left the arena, and here you are again.”

“Yes.”  Victory hasn’t made Will any more comfortable in his own skin.  “And no, no,  it doesn’t actually feel like I’ve left the arena, just or otherwise.  But yes, here we all are again.”

Will does that; reaches out with his words and draws them all in together.  Abigail doesn’t think he means to. 

“Do you think you can do it again, Will?”

“I’m not sure I did it the first time.”

Caesar laughs; it’s a little awkward.  That’s fake, of course; if the sky rained fire, it wouldn’t make Caesar Flickerman awkward in front of a camera.  “But you won!”

“I didn’t lose,” Will says.  “There’s a difference.  I lived.  That’s not winning.”

That – that is what is dangerous about Will Graham.   

“Should we expect a more aggressive approach from you this time, Will?”

“No.”  He’s shaking his head, looking occasionally at Caesar, occasionally at the audience, but mostly keeping his eyes on his knees.

“Come on now, Will, give us something to cheer for!”

“I don’t think that’s something I can _give_ you, to give something you have to have it, and I don’t think – I don’t think my, _our_ having things to cheer for is a thing that plays _any_ part in this.”

Caesar is quiet; the audience is quiet.

Something tickles at the back of Abigail’s throat, runs down her spine – Caesar is unflappable.  And here he is, letting himself be caught in a current not of his own making. 

Not of the Capital’s making?

Abigail turns, lets static fill her ears as she looks past her father, wills her eyes not to focus until they’re on the tributes from District 8.

Alana Bloom must feel the weight of eyes on her (they all do), because she glances down from the screen and Will long enough to give Abigail a small, encouraging smile.  It’s genuinely warm and more than a little sorry, but it’s quick, her eyes back on the screen in seconds.  Abigail isn’t sure if what she feels for Alana is pity or disdain, but she wasn’t looking for her, anyway. 

Hannibal returns her half-questioning, half-accusing look with one of pleasure – _you_ see, _yes? –_ but also challenge.

_I cannot trust your father, Abigail._

“A philosopher!” Caeser sings out, on the stage and on the many screens – just pleasantly, harmlessly surprised, maybe a little put out.  “I think that went a bit over my head, what do you think?”  He turns to the audience, laughing, and they laugh back for him.  “I know you have a lot of fans here, Will -”  He pauses for the cheering, which is thunderous – “- give them _something!_   Why should we root for Will Graham from District 4?”

“You shouldn’t,” Will says flatly.  “My _fans_ -”

The screens cut out, the audio feed to the live audience cuts out.    

The crowd wails and groans in protest. 

Abigail, next up and standing close to the stage, still hears Will conclude his thought.  “- should root for anyone – _anyone_ else, someone with lousy odds, someone bad at this, that would be a good thing.  If they want me to win, really win, that – that would meet a reasonable definition of winning.  Root for Georgia Madchen.”

The first couple rows, at least, had to have heard him. 

A Peacekeeper shoves Abigail hard, his gun in the small of her back.  “Move.”

Her father’s panic flairs like an electrical fire in her veins.  She moves.

In seconds she is standing on the stage, next to the chair where Will Graham is still sitting, squinting and blinking up at her.

The screens pop back into life.  Caesar’s laugh carries out over the cavernous room.  “What is going on here?” he asks, still laughing, carefree in his confusion – except for the fraction of a second where his eyes land on Abigail’s face and he’s demanding something of her, but she doesn’t know quite what. 

“That wasn’t three minutes,” Will Graham protests, but his mic is off, and only Abigail and Caesar can hear him. 

“Technical difficulties?” Abigail offers – her words fill the space in childish echoes; her microphone is on.  She faces the audience and shrugs prettily; her costume is gauze and frills, pale powdered skin and eyes lined to look huge, everything about her pastel and girlish except her red, red mouth. 

“Technical difficulties!” Caesar repeats it like it’s a joke, and the audience, of course, laughs again on cue.  “I’ll say!” 

Her father thinks it’s the tributes who lose their humanity?  At least they have something to lose. 

Will, apparently realizing the futility of protest, stumbles to his feet and gestures for Abigail to take the chair – but Abigail holds out her hand to him.

He takes it, as she’d known he would, he’s like that – pliable, suggestible in the small things.  Abigail spins around him, pulling him with her; all he has to do is stand there and pivot a bit, but it looks like they’re dancing, like he’s shown her oh so graciously into her seat, perfect (poison) little lady that she is. 

It gives her a moment where they’re facing one another and the audience is at her back. 

 _I want in,_ she tries to say, without words, with half a heartbeat’s worth of eye contact in which to make the demand.

Will just blinks at her, and he’s still holding her hand when she sits.  He bows over it – stilted, unpracticed, and genuine. 

It brings her heart into her throat.

He doesn’t know.  He has no idea. 

***

The platform rises. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, let the Seventy-fifth Hunger Games begin!” cries the announcer.

Abigail has a fraction of a second to take in the fact that they are in a decayed, overgrown urban landscape, a crumbling city –

\- and then Georgia Madchen steps off her platform, and is engulfed in a deafening boom and a haze of flame. 


	4. Roots

They had a strategy planned – no, her father had a strategy.  Abigail had –

\- her ears are ringing.  Her head feels hollow, and she’s a small thing spinning inside it, like a marble in a bowl. 

The gong sounds.

Her father is across the clearing (had this been a park?) on the other side of the Cornucopia.  He wanted her to avoid the bloodbath, make for whatever shelter could be found.  Measure a straight line drawn across the mouth of the Cornucopia and run in that direction, to the right, meet 500 yards off, or as near to that as was possible.  That was his plan. 

He’s running right at the Cornucopia.

No, right at her. 

Abigail turns and runs the other way. 

It takes her down an alley choked with brambles; birds rocket out of the brush as she crashes through it. 

Her brain is checking things off, slotting them into tidy columns as her feet pound the uneven pavement: brambles, birds, puddle, four stories up to either side, broken windows - thick, sharp glass.  Old curtains hanging out of the windows -wrap the glass to make a safe hand-hold.  Rope. Bandages.  Kindling. Blankets?  It’s cold.  Not dangerously – yet.  Sun’s up.  Long shadows.  Afternoon here?  Was afternoon outside; daylight may be natural.  Weather may be natural?  The brambles are tearing her pants, tearing her skin.  Brambles could mean berries.  Rose hips?  Something clatters noisily away from a window as she runs past.  Larger game?  Predators.

There is a fence at the end of the alley.  It is topped with razor wire. 

Abigail turns, panting – her breath fogs the air.  (It’s colder than it feels.  Her adrenaline is up.  She has maybe ten minutes to crash.  Don’t throw up.) 

Her father is at the mouth of the alley.  It took her roughly fifty paces to run the length of it.  The nearest window’s glass is too too nearly intact, one fist-sized hole in it surrounded by a spider’s web of fissures.  No good.  Next one down on the left is better, though there's a good bit of glass left at the bottom.

He watches her watching him, taut with anticipation, his eyes following hers . 

“It’s alright,” he calls down the alley.  He has a knife.  Its blade is clean.  He came straight for her.  “Don’t -”

She bolts for the window.  Jumps at it, grabbing the sides so she’s braced in it to kick, but the remnants of glass at the bottom hold and the edges are still sharp and she doesn’t have enough leverage – she’s sobbing.  She can feel crumbling shards digging into her palms, feel her flesh giving way and parting and it doesn’t feel like pain, not yet – it feels like falling apart, like unraveling.  Her hand-holds are going slippery and if she can’t get the glass out of her way she’s going to fall backward.

His hand catches her hair. 

She screams, desperate and raw-throated, and throws her whole weight forward. 

The glass gives, but it catches her as it goes, slices through the already shredded leg of her pants and whispers like a cold kiss across the skin of her calf.  She can’t tell if it’s deep or not – it doesn’t hurt either.  Her leg holds, well enough to pull her forward,  still caught, neck twisting at a jarring angle that spins her around to face him – but his grip falters, his fingers slide through her hair and her hair rips free of her skull and he’s left standing there, clutching a handful of dark strands of her. 

He’s bleeding, she can’t see from where, but there’s blood at his elbows and down his legs.  There’s blood on the glass on the floor in front of the window they came through. 

The room is empty of furniture, the floor littered in leaves that slip under her feet, it smells like something has been living there.  It isn’t there now.  Maybe it had time to run.  There’s a door adjacent to the window, but Abigail is backed into the corner farthest from it.

Balanced on the balls of her feet, bleeding hands held out and ready at her sides, half-crouched. 

“It’s better this way,” her father says, voice choked, pupils blown.  “I won’t let them get you.”

Abigail shakes her head hard, wordless, feeling nausea rising in her throat.  Her heart feels like it will explode in her chest. 

There are voices approaching.  Footsteps.  Someone else came this way.  She can’t tell who – she recognizes the voices, the cadence of the steps is familiar, but her brain can’t process it.  She doesn’t have any focus to spare them.  Her father won’t look away, so neither can she.  It feels like the tension in his body is her own, like she feels his every twitch and her pulse must be pounding his his throat.  Like there are live wires running between their hands.  Break the circuit and it’ll all go dark – he will, or she will, and it’s difficult to separate the two.  She doesn’t want to die.

The voices, the steps are getting closer.  They aren’t running; their tones are tense, but not panicked.  Could the bloodbath be over that quickly?

If she screams – draws their attention – he’d have to deal with them.  Could she do that?  Force the sound up out of her throat before he can -

He sees it, in her face – she knows he does.

“I won’t let them,” he repeats, strangled.

The voices stop.  The steps pause.  They heard him.

He breathes like he’s dying.  His face is white, his eyes fevered.  His hands vibrate, but he won’t drop the knife.  He’ll fall down dead with that knife still in his hand, Abigail knows it, she can feel it in the way her own fingers want to clench.

But the silence is heavy.  He can feel  a presence in the next room, knows he’s (they’re) trapped.  The window is right at his back; escape would be easy.  He could double back and come in behind them – but.  But.

Abigail.   _AbigailabigailABIGAIL.  MINE._

The silence presses, closes in.  Her skin wants to crawl away and hide. 

He looks over his shoulder, to where the voices had been.

(Break the circuit.)

Abigail lunges for the door. 

He whips around, in the same instant that whoever is in the other room gives up on pretense, there is a rapid-fire exchange of words behind the door and a hand closing around her arm like the jaws of a trap.  Swinging her around, trying to reel her in, and she tries – she tries to let her momentum carry her, but his grip is solid this time.  She’s on her knees in the broken glass, just for a moment, then up again, clutched to him, her back to his front. 

His heart is faster than hers.  It doesn’t match.  Just the sound of it, echoing in her chest, feels like it will drive out what little sanity she has left.

His arm wraps hard around her stomach.

The door bursts open, knocked off its hinges. 

The knife is at her throat, cold, cold, _so cold._

Will Graham is there, in the door, with a gun in his hands.  (A gun?  There are never guns.  Guns aren’t allowed.) 

“It’s alright,” her father murmurs, mutters, thinks into her ear.  “I’m going to make it all go away.”

“Drop it!” Will orders.  He’s shaking as hard as her father is – except his hands.  His hands are so, so steady.  Abigail can see down the barrel of the gun (that’s ridiculous, it’s a pinhole, he’s across the room), see a gaping void ready to swallow her (him?)

(She doesn’t want to die!)

Hannibal Lecter stands at Will’s back.  He’s calm.  He’s watching Abigail – just Abigail, only Abigail, her face is no measurable distance from her father’s, he’s whispering some incomprehensible litany of regret right into her brain and there is no possible way to look at one of them and not the other –

\- but Hannibal is looking only at her. 

“Do it,” Abigail manages to say – no sound, just her lips carving out the words.

“You don’t have to do this!” Will Graham insists.  “Don’t do this, we’ll – we’ll find a way, another way -”

Her father exhales, and it pushes the air from Abigail’s lungs as his arm tightens, and there is a moment in which it all goes perfectly, beautifully still. 

“Everything’s going to be okay,” he breathes. 

The knife cuts across her throat.  Will Graham fires.  Garrett Jacob Hobbs – _Dad!_  - falls back.

Abigail floats free, suspended in the air by a perfect arc of red. 

Something hits the ground, hard.  Two things?  Bang.  Bang.  Bangbangbangbang –

It hurts.  It all hurts, all at once, it crashes into her and there is something growing through the ceiling over her.  White roots dangle.  She can’t make her arms work, can’t lift her hands to her own throat to stop the blood. 

(Everything’s going to be okay.)

Will’s bloodsplattered face blocks out the broken ceiling and the roots.  His hands pawing at her feel like butterfly wings, as insubstantial as they are ineffectual.

Then he’s gone.  The roots drip. 

“Abigail.”  Hannibal. 

His hand curls around her throat, implacable and burning.  She whimpers, chokes.  “Listen to me.  You are going to be -”  He stops. 

(Please?)

“All will be well,” he says.  “It would be best if you allowed yourself to lose consciousness now.”

Allowed?  Allowed herself? 

But she does.


	5. Threads

She wakes drowning, throat convulsing, trying to remember how to swallow.  It hurts, unbelievably much, but with a terrifying lack of specificity – she can’t tell if her neck’s still gaping, if the feeling of something wrapped tight is internal or external, bandages or just shock, paralysis setting in. 

The water, though, she’s pretty sure the water is real. 

It’s flooding her sinuses and she can’t breathe.  Abigail tries not to choke, not to cough, not to move, petrified that the drip running down the back of her neck and into her hair didn’t come from her mouth.  Did he open her throat?  She can feel the catch when she tries to swallow, the pull of something wrong, but she can’t tell – she can’t tell –

“Oh, shit – she’s awake!” someone calls.  A female someone.  A hand cradles the back of her head.  The water stops.  Abigail coughs in spite of herself, her torso curling upward with the spasming of her diaphragm, and the hand at the base of her skull is joined by one supporting her shoulders – and then another, lower on her back.  Three hands; at least two people. 

She manages to swallow; it tugs at skin that is raw and fragile and burning, but nothing gives. 

“It’s alright,” says the same voice – Alana.  Alana Bloom. 

Abigail tries to get her eyes to focus, but they’re crusted and gummy and running.  She can taste blood in her mouth, and something else, something foul – possibly also blood, she thinks, only older.  Her head is swimming; her stomach lurches and that has her gasping, sucking air in utter desperation.  She doesn’t want to even think about what it would feel like to throw up. 

Her hands obey before she can get her eyes to work, though there’s something wrapped around them too, something thick and soft that means she can’t bend her fingers very far.  She manages to bring them to her neck, and feels cloth.    

The hand at the base of her skull leaves her, but then catches her hand – holds, but doesn’t pull.  Abigail manages to blink and focus on the vague shape of a pale face surrounded by dark hair.  “There’s a bandage around your neck,” Alana tells her.  “Under that, you have stiches – there, and in your leg.  Hannibal didn’t stitch your hands, he said you’d just end up ripping those, and the cuts were shallow.”

“Hguh –“  Abigail swallows again, and again, because it burns, and she wants to chase the burn, the catch, the sensation of _wrong wrong WRONG,_ wants to swallow and swallow and swallow until the scream bouncing around in her skull finds its way down to her throat.  She’d wanted to say, ‘how’ – how long.

“Three days.” 

Abigail startles and jerks her hand from Alana’s, blinking furiously, needing her eyes to focus, damn it, _now._ Three _da_ y _s?_ Three days unconscious, in the arena.

That can’t be right.  Can’t be true.  If it’s not true then Alana is lying and if Alana is lying then she isn’t safe and she has to –

Alana draws away, but someone else – the owner of the other hand on her back – crowds in closer.  She tries to flinch, but it’s more of a flail, and then Alana’s in her space again, catching her shoulder, steadying her.  There’s nothing she can do about it. 

“Give yourself a minute,” says Will Graham.  “We’ve been able to give you small amounts of water but no food, you’re going to be light-headed.  It’d be better if you ate something before you tried to stand.” 

Abigail blinks and swallows and blinks and swallows and eventually realizes that the reason her eyes still won’t focus is that she’s crying – she’s broken and she’s helpless and her father tried to kill her and her father is _dead_ and her throat feels stretched taut to the point of tearing.  Like it wants to rip itself open again. 

“Breathe,” Will says. 

Abigail draws in a shaking, shuddering breath.

“That’s good,” Alana tells her.  “That’s great, now again.”

Abigail breathes, and Abigail cries, because nothing, absolutely nothing makes any sense at all and she’s weak, she’s _broken_ , and _her father is dead_. 

Alana stands and walks a little ways away, out of Abigail’s range of vision; Abigail can hear her talking to someone else, two someones, male and female, both voices deep – the Crawfords, she thinks, but the words are nonsense.  He, the male voice, he isn’t happy – he’s angry, he’s a threat, he’s –

“Just keep breathing,” Will tells her.  His hand is a steady warmth at her back. 

“You -”  Abigail closes her eyes and swallows one last time; that actually sounded like a word.  She’s functional; close enough to.  Close enough.   She is in the arena; weak and broken aren’t options here.

(She felt surer of foot and safer in the arena than she had felt anywhere else for a long, long time – but then he followed her there.)

“You killed my dad.”

The hand on her back hadn’t been moving, it had just been there, but she can still feel the way he goes utterly still. 

“Why not let him kill me?  One less person for you to worry about.  That’s how you did it, right?” She twists around to face him, sniffs, wipes her eyes on the back of her bandaged hand.  It gives her a view over his shoulder at the same time, a view of the room.  “You let them take each other out.”

“It wasn’t exactly a strategy.”  _He_ swallows, now.  Convulsively.    “More like declining to have a strategy.  I declined to participate.”

“That worked out pretty well for you.”

He tilts his head and his face contorts, not quite a smile, not quite a grimace – not at her, either way.  “It did.”

They’re in a rectagular room, one door, two tiny cellar windows high on the walls.  The floor is scattered remnants of linoleum over cement.  There’s a fire, situated under a hole in the ceiling.  There are more packs than people.  It doesn’t smell like piss or shit so either they haven’t been here very long or – no, the fire’s old, the ceiling smoke-stained around jagged edges of where it’s collapsed.  They’ve been here a while.  Days.  Alana wasn’t lying.  They’re secure enough where they are to venture out of this room to piss somewhere else. 

Abigail brings her eyes back to Will’s face, but slowly, no jerky, guilty movements.

 “Why are there guns?” she asks.  “There are never guns.”

“Well, this time there are,” Will answers.  “Maybe Quarter Quells have guns.” 

Maybe they wanted this one fast and bloody, Abigail thinks.   From the looks of this space and the people in it, that’s not turning out so well for them.

“I would have let him put the knife down.”

“He would have killed you,” Abigail says, and hears the absolute conviction in her own voice – how it sounds almost like pride.  Her stomach twists around itself.  “Aren’t you worried that I might turn on you?  I never agreed to this; I’m not sure it’s really a good idea, this many people.  Is Hannibal still with you too?  Or is he dead?”

“Hannibal isn’t dead.  He’s out looking for food.  Beverly too.  Not together - he doesn’t like that.”

She’s relieved – there’s a catch and pull of affection to it, something she recognizes dispassionately as the connection he’d wanted.  She took the bait, more than she realized or intended.  But it’s not just that; it’s also that Hannibal is predictable, maybe a little bit infatuated with her, and very, very deadly. 

Alliances this large never last. 

 “Abigail, your father didn’t want to kill you because you were _competition_ ,” Will says.  “He wanted to spare you the suffering, the – the _degradation_ of it.  He didn’t choose his own survival over yours.”

Will doesn’t only want to have protected her from a knife; he wants to protect her from the fact that there ever was a knife, from her father’s nature.

 “I know that,” Abigail says flatly, haughtily, but then she takes a shaky, burning breath, and lets her voice wobble a little.  “It doesn’t matter.  I’m still dead, aren’t I?”   She lifts her chin and her bandaged hands, then lets them fall.  “Dead weight.  Why even keep me around?”  It’s not hard to keep her voice sincere, because she’s not really pretending – just choosing the reaction that’s useful.

“Because you don’t deserve that,” Will says.  “He had no right to make that choice for you _._   You’re a human being.  We are all human beings, under our masks, our calluses.”

 _My father wasn’t,_ she thinks, but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? 

“We’re all survivors,” Abigail counters.  “And we’re all killers.”  She pauses.  “You too, now.”

“Yes.”  He laughs, the sound somewhere on the line between bitter and unhinged.  “Me too.” 

“How’d it feel?” she asks.

“How did _you_ feel?” he retorts. 

“I had nightmares,” Abigail tells him; she isn’t lying.  She also isn’t talking about killing her opponents in the arena.  That didn’t bother her at all, really.  (It did - but it was better.  It was a relief, the idea of millions of people watching her, knowing she was a killer. And then they threw parties and parades for her – for being the _best_ killer.)

“You have to sleep to have nightmares,” Will says. 

“Sleep deprivation means slower reflexes,” Abigail points out.  “Impaired judgment.” 

Will’s jaw twitches.  “I’m aware.” 

“What are you trying to do?” she finally asks.

“I’m participating,” Will answers.

***

Alana ushers Will away, but then she hovers , talking constantly in a staccato rhythm of carefully chosen words that are as self-conscious as they seem to be compulsive. 

According to Alana, they’re maybe a mile south-west of the Cornucopia – the distance seems ridiculous to Abigail, and she says so. 

“We’ve scouted as far as five miles out, in four directions.” A pause.  “We lost Zeller, from three; Beverly took it pretty hard.  It was Freddy, and _Will -_ ” She glances behind her, to see that he’s not listening; he’s not, he’s fussing with the fire. “ - took _that_ hard.”  Alana sighs.  “He felt responsible.  They shared a district.  He feels responsible a lot.”

“Five miles out,” Abigail says.

Alana presses her lips together, watching Will a moment longer before she turns back to Abigail.  “We’re estimating distances, but yes, five miles.  There’s a force field to the west; we didn’t hit any obstruction in any other direction.”

“A hundred square miles,” Abigail says doubtfully.

“At least,” Alana affirms.  “It’s not all as urban as this.”

“Why would they do that?  Twenty-four people in over a hundred square miles could set up territories and _live_ there.  For a really long time.”  It explains the guns, though.

“They wanted to make it a challenge?” Alana guesses, shrugging. 

“They wanted to show off,” Bella Crawford interjects from across the room.  She stands, her husband watching her before he turns his eyes to Abigail – Jack doesn’t say a word, but his expression is a flat-out threat.  She looks at Bella funny, she’s dead.   

Bella takes a cup from beside the fire - it’s a chipped old thing, but fine china.  The paint is peeling on the walls, a muddy gray on the surface, but the rippled edges show layers – blues and reds and greens, still bright.  She fills the cup from a jug in the corner and brings it over to Abigail.

“Drink,” she says. 

“I’m not -”

“We didn’t go to all the trouble of carrying you here so that you could die of dehydration,” Bella tells her.  “We’ve been changing your bandages twice a day.  Diapering you like an infant.  Hannibal sleeps at your back, wrapped around you.  For warmth, he says; it’s not for warmth.  It’s in case one of us decides you’re too much trouble.  He’d have killed one of us, when we’re whole and capable and worth something, to protect you, when you were just a corpse that didn’t have the sense to stop breathing.  So one of us has poured water down your throat every waking hour for the last three days, even when he was gone, because he’ll come back.  I have no doubt whatsoever that he will come back.  He said every hour.  It’s been more than an hour since you woke up.  Drink.”

Abigail drinks. 

“I am not afraid of him,” Bella says – and Abigail believes her, because Bella’s head nods almost imperceptibly, and her eyes shift.  Jack is maybe two meters behind her, on his feet, watching Abigail like he’d like to snap her neck just to be safe.  Then Bella’s eyes are back on Abigail’s, dead and single-minded and vengeful as a ghost.  “Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Abigail says, and takes another painful swallow of the mineral-bitter water, while Alana gives an aggrieved sigh. 

“Was that necessary?” Alana demands.

“You tell me,” Bella answers.

Alana looks over Bella’s shoulder at Jack; Alana isn’t very good at being subtle.  Jack stalks off into the corner and picks up the shotgun that’s propped there.  There is a pile of what used to be curtains nearby, and the two halves of the copper curtain rod; he picks up the rod and rips off a piece of curtain and starts cleaning the gun.   Alana sighs again. 

“Alright, maybe it was,” she concedes, shooting Jack a dirty look that he meets with impassive belligerence.  Her jaw hardens, her eyes going narrow and sharp.

She’s so soft-looking, gentle and careful in her speech – it’s easy to forget that Alana killed six tributes herself with a slingshot, when she was thirteen years old and weighed all of eighty pounds. 

“Is there a _problem?_ ” Jack calls across the room.  He snaps the gun shut.  The curtain rod makes a hollow ringing sound when it hits the ground.  The gun is unloaded, but Will is on his feet, looking back and forth between Jack and Alana before stepping very deliberately between them.

“No,” he says, facing Jack.  “There isn’t.”

“I don’t think I was talking to you,” Jack says.

“You are now.”

Alana gets to her feet slowly, uncoiling like a snake.  Bella stays where she is, crouched in front of Abigail.  She doesn’t say _this is your fault,_ and she doesn’t say _if this goes badly, I will open your throat with my fingers._ It doesn’t really need saying. 

“Jack,” Bella’s voice snaps out.  “There is no problem.” 

“You sure about that?  Are _you_ sure about that?”  The latter question is directed in equal parts to Alana and to Will, and Abigail tenses, fingers tightening on the cup.  “If this needs to be handled, now is the time.  Hell, two days ago was the time.” 

Now, while Hannibal isn’t there, while Abigail is (her father is _dead,_ how is that possible?) alone and helpless.  She’s not even sure she can work her hands well enough to shatter the cup in such a way that she’d be left with the handle and a sharp edge.  She can barely hold it.  She’s not sure she can stand, and there are four of them. 

 “Yes,” Bella says, to Abigail – the threat very, very clear.  “I’m sure.”

“Nothing is being _handled,_ ” Alana snaps. 

“No,” Jack retorts, his voice getting louder and harder by the heartbeat.  “Nothing _is_ being handled.  I am aware of that, Alana, I am _very_ aware of that.” 

“Stop!” Will shouts, flinging his arms out to the sides – like he wants to physically hold them apart, despite the half a room of air between his shaking, raised hands and Jack and Alana. 

Abigail wonders if Bella engineered this; if she wanted to put on a play of how high tensions are running, so that Abigail would understand the precariousness of her position clearly.  A small explosion designed to avoid a larger one.  Would Bella – _could_ Bella do that? 

Abigail could.  Bella’s face gives her nothing, except the fact that Bella knows that. 

Will sighs shakily, loud in the sudden silence.  “Just – stop, everybody calm down.” 

And then there’s a single, loud knock at the door.

The whole room freezes for less than a breath, and then they’re all flying into motion, weapons appearing in hands and bodies arrayed around the room in an obviously well-practiced arrangement.  Abigail is left where she is, out in the open, between the fire and the door; Will’s eyes dart to her, pained; he starts edging across the floor, silent, but slow.

 _“Will!”_ Jack hisses.

Bella begins to shift to cover Will’s abandoned position; Alana holds at the door, knife poised to strike. 

One heartbeat of silence, two, three – and then a further series of knocks, a pattern, and at the sound the room collectively exhales.  Alana sheaths her knife and opens the door.  Beverly looks around, sees where they’re all standing, sees knives and guns being tucked away.

“What the hell, guys, who was watching the window?” Beverly asks, then sees Abigail.  “Oh.  Hey.”

“Hey,” Abigail returns, and has to clear her throat. 

That’s all the attention Abigail gets.  Beverly turns to glare at Will and Jack in turn.  “I could hear you halfway down the street.” 

“Sorry,” Will says, rubbing at the back of his neck and turning away.  “We were having a disagreement.”

“Yeah, no shit.” 

“What’s that?” Jack nods his head at the bundle of leaves and roots in Beverly’s left hand.

“Dandelions,” Bella answers, a the same time Beverly says, “Dinner, you’re welcome.”  Bella pushes to her feet.  “I’ve got watch.” And she goes out the door. 

“We set guards when we’re cooking,” Alana explains, folding back down to the floor beside Abigail.  “Smells carry.” 

“ _Smoke_ carries,” Abigail points out.

“Smoke only means someone’s here,” Alana says.  “Cooking means someone’s here, has food, and is distracted.” 

Jack follows Bella.

“We should hang some of those up to dry,” Will says, nodding down at Beverly, who is sitting cross-legged beside the fire and scrubbing the roots clean with a bit of cloth.  (Not water, Abigail notes, and wonders how reliable a source of water they have.)  “You can make tea with dandelion roots.  It tastes almost like coffee.”

Beverly gives him an incredulous look and a tolerant smile.  “Tea?  Really?”

“It has medicinal properties,” Will argues.

“So does proper nutrition,” Beverly counters.  “Do we have any of those little onion things left?  This could almost taste like food, if we do.  Throw it all in the pan.  Some oil would be nice.”

“Oil?” Will says, mimicking her tone of a moment ago.  “Really?”

Beverly snorts.  Will smiles. 

Alana pats Abigail’s knee.  “Jack will come around,” she says.  “Why don’t we unwrap your hands, see how they look.” 

Abigail just stares at her for a moment before holding out her hands.  She knows her face is giving too much away, but really can’t help it.

They’re all acting like this can be permanent; like it’s the whole group of them against whoever else is out there – against the Game itself.  Her own words come back to her; in more than a hundred square miles, two dozen people could hide from each other without any real effort for weeks, if not months.  If not _years._

The Gamemakers won’t allow that.  However much they may want to show off the vastness of their control, the limitlessness of their resources, they won’t let a full quarter of their tributes just sit around playing house for very long. 

 


	6. Feathers

They take turns at watch, except for Abigail – while her hands have healed better than she expected, still scabbed but functional, she is weak. 

(She is afraid; it still feels like she might rip her own neck open if she moves too quickly).

Dandelion leaves are bitter; the roots, roasted, aren’t much better, but there’s more substance to them.  Abigail feels queasier for having eaten than she was before, but she recognizes this as the inevitable after-effect of three days’ starvation.  It’s not the first time she’s gone without food.

Will eats last, Jack and Bella having come and gone, and Beverly having joined them outside.  Alana stays, after her watch, sitting next to Will by the fire.  Abigail is in the process of curling up in a corner to wait out the roiling of her stomach when they hear the canon blast.

All three freeze; Abigail’s first thought is that it sounds so _distant._ Will’s face goes blank, but Alana gets to her feet, shoulders squared, fingers curling, eyes riveted on the window.  Will looks away.

“It’s not him,” he says.  There’s no false bravado in it, just the flat, almost hostile statement of a fact.  The hostility doesn’t seem to be directed at Alana, which leaves the ‘him’ in question - Hannibal.  They were getting along fine the last time Abigail was awake; something has changed.  She tucks the knowledge away.

Alana shakes her head.  Her right hand clenches and unclenches.  “You don’t know that.”

“I have a reasonable degree of certainty.  And if I’m wrong, there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

Alana raises a brow, incredulous.

“I’m not very good at being comforting,” Will says - and that, too, is just the statement of a fact.  There’s a hint of mockery in it, but it’s directed back at himself. 

Alana lets the air fall from her lungs in a rush.  “I want to believe you – and I have every reason to believe you.”

“But you don’t.”

“But I don’t,” Alana says, eyes back on the window.  “No one can possibly account for every variable, every moment of choice – that’s what my mind is telling me, even if past history would suggest that you have a . . . an almost preternatural ability to do just that.”

“It’s not preternatural,” Will objects.

“Whatever it is,” Alana says, “I want it to be right.”

“So do I,” Will says, pauses, and adds, “For your sake, if for no other reason.”  Despite his words there’s  no overt kindness in his tone.  He glances up at her, quick and furtive.

Alana sighs again.  She watches him a moment longer before she crosses the small space between them, sits close beside him – he gives her another darting, almost panicked look, but can’t hold her gaze – and leans her head onto his shoulder. 

“I worry,” Will says, eyes on the ground,  “when you’re out there, and I’m in here, even when I _know_ that I have _no_ reason.  I know that you are completely, deadly capable - far more than I am - but I still want to be there. ”

Alana smiles; Will can’t possibly see it, watching the ground the way he is, but his lips twitch up at the corners at nearly the same time – just a little. 

“I know he can take care of himself,” Alana says.  “And no, the way I worry about Hannibal is not the same as the way you worry about me.”  She pauses a beat.  “I hope, anyway.”

“You hope?” Will repeats, the same sentiment echoing almost painfully in his tone. 

“Yeah,” Alana says, and closes her eyes.  “I do.”  Another pause, and then, almost too quietly for Abigail to hear, she says, “Thank you for that.”

***

Hannibal arrives as the sun is setting.

 Jack walks him into the room with one hand on his shoulder, smiling.  “We’re eating well tonight,” he pronounces.  Alana gets to her feet and looks momentarily like she wants to embrace Hannibal, but settles for a meeting of eyes, her lips pressed together.  A short nod, which he returns.  Then she’s walking out the door behind him without a word spoken. 

Abigail wonders if she’s going to cry; she still can’t decide what she thinks of Alana.  She’s so transparent; Abigail wants to be disdainful of that, dismissive, but she knows better.

Will remains seated, facing the fire, not even acknowledging Hannibal’s presence.

Jack’s hand thumps Hannibal’s shoulder, twice before falling away – it’s companionable, and it’s palpably artificial, though Abigail doesn’t think the satisfaction on his face is feigned.  Jack doesn’t care about Hannibal for his own sake, but he cares about having all of his people accounted for, and Hannibal – unlike Abigail – is one of his own. 

From the carefully relaxed way that Hannibal accepts the physical contact, the pleasant blandness of his expression, Abigail’s pretty sure that sentiment is not reciprocated. 

What the two men are to one another is _useful_ ; they respect each other as a _resource_.  She wants to roll her eyes at the way both of them dance around that, but that – that would be as obvious as they’re being.  She’s better than that.

Hannibal has a dead duck in each hand, held by their feet, broken necks dangling.  He looks across the room, sees her, and smiles – the same disarming smile he gave her in the training room, and Abigail feels a momentary surge of panic because it looks genuine to her.  She believes that smile, and she doesn’t know if that means it’s real or it means he’s playing her just as skillfully as he’s obviously playing Jack Crawford. 

“Abigail,” Hannibal says, delighted.

“Ah, yes,” Jack says – his façade of good humor still firmly in place, but wearing thin.  “Our patient is back amonst the living.” As if he’d never been anything but pleased about that.

Abigail smiles tightly at them both. 

“So I see,” Hannibal says.  “I am very glad.” 

“Thanks,” Abigail says.  _Thank you for being glad.  Thank you for carrying my senseless body around for three days.  Thank you for your hands around my neck._

***

Jack rejoins the others outside; Will stays, though he has yet to acknowledge Hannibal’s presence.  Hannibal sits down in front of Abigail, his back to the fire and Will. 

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Alive,” Abigail says, and shrugs. 

His lips quirk, and he goes to work plucking one of the ducks.  “Alive is good.  We will have to check your stitches later.  Have you tried to stand?”

“I can do that,” she says.  “And walk, though I’m not sure about running – not without pulling stitches, anyway, but I could if I had to.”

He hums.  “And your neck?”

Her breath hitches; he looks up at the precise moment necessary to see the horror on her face, and holds her eyes until she swallows it down.  She stares back, defiant; he looks pleased.  “Fine,” she says.

“Good,” he says, and returns his attention to the duck.  “That is very good.” 

He hasn’t looked at Will once, so Abigail does.  Will is staring into the fire, prodding it with a stick.  His jaw is squared, clenched – he’s going to give himself a headache, Abigail thinks.

“Will and I have had a disagreement,” Hannibal tells her – though he hasn’t looked up to see where she’s been looking.

“Disagreement?” Will repeats in tones of disbelief.  He still doesn’t turn his head in their direction.

“We encountered another small party before we were able to convene with the group assembled here,” Hannibal explains calmly, eyes still downcast, to all appearances focused on his task.  Abigail doesn’t buy it; she can almost feel his bristling alertness, tuned to Will’s slightest twitch.

“Who?” Abigail asks.

“The Boyles.  Marissa Schurr.” 

“Are they dead?”

“Nicholas Boyle lives,” Hannibal answers. 

She could feel badly about Marissa, who, like Hannibal, had made a perfunctory effort to be Abigail’s friend; Marissa was brave, and generous.  She could, but she doesn’t, beyond a sort of hollow pang in her gut, a flash of nausea and a wince that she doesn’t allow to show.  That’s two she won’t have to kill herself. 

“Will feels that I acted rashly,” Hannibal concludes. 

“Not _rashly,_ ” Will corrects.  “There was absolutely nothing _impetuous_ about it, not that I saw.  _Clinically_ might be a better word.  Coldly.  Like they were so much _meat._ ”

“You would feel better about their deaths if I were distraught?” Hannibal asks, ever so patient and unconcerned.  Will cannot see the way the veins on the backs of his hands stand out and pulse, how the muscles of his forearms have gone tense.  There is brutality to the movement of his hands now, where there had been only brisk efficiency; Abigail finds herself mesmerized by the nearly imperceptible tremor that shivers along the edge of Hannibal’s every move. 

Will’s opinion matters to him.  A lot. 

“No, I would feel better about _you_ if you were distraught,” Will retorts.  “Their deaths are what they are.” 

“Perhaps I am what I am as well,” Hannibal says. 

Pluck, pluck, pluck go his long fingers with their blunt and callused ends, vicious in the way they pinch and twist.  There is something unforgiving in the angle of his wrist.  She should stop staring, but he’s so wrapped up in pretending not to be wrapped up in Will that Hannibal doesn’t even seem to notice, so maybe it’s safe for now. 

(There has never been anything safe about allowing herself to notice someone that way.  There is even less that is safe about Hannibal.)

“Are younot what youare, irrespective of what the Games might have made of you?” Hannibal asks.

This is greeted by a space of several breaths in which there is only the ripping, popping sound of plucked feathers and the hiss and pop of the fire.

“I’ve killed,” Will finally says. 

Abigail feels herself go hot and then cold, dizzy for half a moment.  Hannibal looks up, his eyes catching hers – she’d love to know how he keeps doing that, what makes her so predictable to him.  There is concern in his expression, and she is betting her life that it’s genuine, whether she wants to or not.  She shakes her head.

“In defense of another life,” Hannibal counters, his eyes still holding her .  “It is not the same.”

“No,” Will answers, drawing the word out.  “It’s not.  But it’s not nothing.  I’m not  . . . unchanged.  Unsullied.”

“But are you unmade?” Hannibal tosses out.  “Are you a different creature, for having pulled that trigger?”

He is still watching Abigail, as if to say that he knows exactly what sort of creature she is – they are.  Will is a different species entirely.  A handful of bullets don’t change that; Abigail’s pretty sure that the world could burn down around them and that wouldn’t change.  It’s what makes Will different.

What makes Will _important._

(Hannibal would like to believe that Will’s importance is what makes Will important to him.  It’s not.  Abigail can see that; she’s not sure Hannibal can himself.) 

“I know who I am,” Will says, and sighs, long and shaky.  “And we weren’t talking about me.”

“Weren’t we?  What were we discussing, from your perspective?”

The first duck is completely plucked.  The broader, sturdier feathers sit in a neat pile; the down drifts across the floor on some faint current, some vibration or movement of air too subtle for Abigail to feel.  There’s a ridiculous volume of down, more than she would have thought could possibly come from a single duck; it makes Abigail think of snow. 

“Mercy,” Will says, at length.

“Mercy,” Hannibal says, “is the province of the strong.  A luxury.”

“Are you saying you’re _weak?_ ” Will scoffs.  “Because I’m not going to believe that – not that it’s the case and not that you believe it.”  He gives a short, bitter laugh.  “Luxury.  I thought you were all about luxury.”

“In the right circumstances, yes,” Hannibal allows.  “I make no apology for that.”

“What _do_ you apologize for?” Will demands.  “Is that a thing that you do?  Apologize?”

“I am sorry that I have upset you,” Hannibal says smoothly.

Will laughs again, angry and incredulous.  “Good, that was good.”

“It was honest,” Hannibal responds.

“I know,” Will allows.  Abigail watches him tilt his head back, eyes seeking something beyond the ceiling.  His throat bobs as he swallows.  “I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Not very much,” Hannibal says.

“No, not very much,” Will agrees, to the ceiling, before letting his head drop forward and hang there.  “It doesn’t happen again,” he says.  The words are made up of equal parts totally unconscious authority and cringing regret.  There’s more forgiveness in them than he wants there to be.

Hannibal’s eyes slip closed; his lips are a hard line.  “I cannot promise that.”

“I’m not asking you to promise me anything,” Will says.  “I am _telling_ you, that is not going to happen again.  No one else is getting a spear through their chest before they’ve had a chance to open their mouth.  I am not watching you gut anyone else like a fish.”

 “A universal alliance is not possible,” Hannibal argues, eyes opening, but staring down into the feathers – and there is something very, very careful in his words.  “At the very point at which it is reached, it must begin to break down.”

He’s lying.

It’s subtle; he’s good at it.  Abigail is better at it.  Hannibal’s lies are a predator’s camoflauge, but Abigail has been both predator and prey, and he can’t hold a candle to her. 

Will has gone still, so tense he is vibrating visibly.

He knows Hannibal is lying, too. 

No, not quite that - because he finally turns in Hannibal’s direction, glaring, radiating frustration at the back of Hannibal’s head. 

Will is somehow complicit in the lie Hannibal is telling – to her?  To their audience, to the Gamemakers?  Will’s eyes slide to Abigail and his thwarted fury collapses into regret. 

“You're right,” he says, all but choking on the words.  “And I don’t care.  That’s not happening again.  I need  - I need to get out of here, I need air.” And he stands and leaves.

They’re lying, she’s sure they’re lying, but what Hannibal said is obviously true – is common sense.

“You were unconscious,” Hannibal tells her, once Will’s footsteps have faded.  He picks up the second duck and begins again.  “It put us in a vulnerable position – through no fault of yours, of course, but that was the reality all the same.  Will would like to believe that the encounter might have ended differently, had I reacted in another way – and he is right.  There are always many outcomes possible.  I chose the one in which our survival was a certainty.  You, I expect, will understand.”

“You could have left me,” Abigail says.

“Yes,” he agrees.  “I could have.”

“But not Will.”

“Will could not have left you?  Or I could not have left Will?” he asks, brow quirked.

“I won’t die because he can’t kill,” Abigail says, then grimaces.  “Not everyone is going to be nice enough to give him a victim to save so that he can feel better about it.” 

Hannibal smiles, at that, wry and approving – and reaches one hand out to brush her hair behind her ear. 

She flinches – she can’t help it.  His hand hovers, and his smile falters.

The mask slips, for just a moment, and the thing underneath it is all thirsty rage, drinking down everything that is broken about her at the same time that it wants an impossible vengeance for her.  It just likes the pain.  All of it. 

“No,” he says, fingers tracing the edge of her cheek.  The bone beneath feels fragile, the touch sinking into her in ways that make her want to turn her head and bite, if only to prove to herself that she can.  “You will not.” 

It’s a promise, if she can believe it.

( _Everything will be alright_ , her father’s ghost whispers in her ear.)


	7. Shadows

“Hey.”  Beverly folds awkwardly down into the corner where Abigail sits picking at the scabs on her palms.  Hannibal is patrolling with Alana; Jack and Bella are speaking softly in the other corner, their shoulders propping one another up.  “Sorry about your dad.”

Abigail’s hands still. 

“Thanks,” she says.  Then, “You warned me.”

“Yeah, about the wrong thing,” Beverly says.

“Still.  Thanks,” Abigail repeats.   

The sun is nearly gone, and the room is filling up with soft shadows.  Alana showed Abigail their makeshift outhouse earlier, while there was still some light – a room nearby with a hole in the floor –  and walked her around the rest of the  building and its attendant alleyways.  They’ve rigged traps where possible, and alarms where not (the distinction being primarily in the weight and sharpness of the items set to fall), guarding most approaches.  Abigail knows she is as secure is she is going to get anywhere in the arena.  Her stomach is full and her bladder is empty, but she is cold and stiff and her leg aches sharply. 

There is a knife strapped to her thigh – the knife her father used to cut her throat.  Hannibal had saved it for her.  Abigail can feel it there in a way that isn’t entirely physical; it is heavier than it should be, and colder than is logical through the thick cloth of her pants.

“Why’d you pick gardening for a talent?” Beverly asks – then, before Abigail has a chance to answer, continues,  “Mine was calligraphy,” and snorts, as if Abigail wouldn’t have known that – both what her talent was, and that it had been foisted on her.

“I got pretty good at it,” Beverly adds, tone full of the sort of cynical equanimity they’ve all had to perfect.  

“I liked being outside,” Abigail says.

Beverly hums sympathy, and Abigail wants to stick her knife right through Beverly’s vibrating throat for it, to skewer that sound, but only briefly.  The scab in the center of her palm isn’t quite ready to be peeled away, and it hurts enough to distract her.  The skin beneath is pale pink and oozing, a little bloody right at the center.  It will scab again, but the scab will be smaller and thinner and less likely to crack and bleed and render her hands slick at the wrong moment. 

It will scar, because she’s doing this, but not, Abigail thinks, in a way that will hamper her dexterity.  She hopes.  It doesn’t matter.

***

“We should be moving,” Jack says, pacing the length of the room. 

It is fully dark now, save for the hazy moonlight coming in the window and refracting off the lingering smoke.  They have all retreated into the room with the fire, the door locked behind them.  The space is too large to do much to conserve the heat of their congregated bodies. 

“In the morning,” Bella says; she is braiding strips of curtain into a long rope.  The night outside is full of sounds – odd yodeling calls and huffs and barks and snarls. 

“I’m not sure Abigail’s ready for a long march,” Alana interjects.  “Let alone a sprint, if we have to.”

“Which makes waiting to be found here a better idea?” Jack counters. 

“I can run,” Abigail says; she’s not actually sure about that, but she’s demonstrated, by way of Alana’s little tour, that she can walk.  She’d rather improvise when her leg gives out than when six people in a locked room decide she’s dead weight. 

(But she’s been dead weight.) 

“Hannibal?” Jack asks.  “Will?”

Alana bristles.  “Oh, here we go,” Beverly mutters, low enough that Abigail’s pretty sure she’s the only one who hears. 

“I will defer to Abigail’s own assessment of her fitness for travel,” Hannibal says smoothly, and Will snorts, amused.

“Not what I was asking, _doctor,_ ” Jack says.  Hannibal’s face closes off in a way that makes Abigail tense, though Jack doesn’t seem to notice.  

“We’ve still got neighbors,” Beverly says – deliberately breaking the tension.  “Maybe new neighbors.  I saw more tracks today then yesterday, and somebody out there doesn’t care about hiding the dregs of their dinner or covering it when they take a shit.  Either somebody’s getting careless, or it’s someone new.  I’m betting new.”

“Frederick Chilton’s still close,” Will says.  “But he has been for the past two days, he’s no real threat.  Freddy Lounds is a real threat, but she’ll go after easier prey first – sorry,” he says, glancing in Beverly’s direction. 

“You’ve got to stop acting like we’re all so fragile,” Beverly says, though her voice and her eyes are tight.  “Zeller’s not the last person we’re going to lose.”

The room goes silent; outside, the beasts hold court.

Hannibal clears his throat.  “There is no harm in optimism.”

“Yeah there is,” Beverly counters, “If it makes him pull his punches like that.  Zeller’s dead.  We can’t do anything for him anymore.”

“We’ll all be joining him soon enough anyway,” Bella says, terribly calm with an edge like shattered glass beneath her words.  “All but one of us.  Remember?”   She raises her eyes and looks around the room at each of them.

Beverly exhales noisily.

“I believe this alliance is still of benefit to all of us,” Hannibal says soothingly.  “However, if you disagree -”

“I didn’t say that,” Bella says.  “I’m just saying it’s a thing we should keep in mind.” 

“I don’t think any of us are forgetting that,” Jack says.

“That’s not how it sounded to me,” Bella counters, giving him a hard look.

There is another moment of heavy silence, eyes shifting and meeting around the room, then nods, wry expressions of apology.  It makes sense, at surface level – it does.  But it doesn’t.  Abigail has the feeling – has the visceral _certainty_ – that there is a whole different conversation occurring in front of her than the one she’s hearing.  The content of that conversation eludes her – it would be easy to assume the alliance is already fracturing, that what she is sensing is the shifting of loyalties to smaller parties, but that doesn’t feel right.  They’re _all_ talking around something, one thing. 

Jack sighs.  “Right.  Will?”

“The tracks,” Will says.  “Man or woman?”

“Man, I’d guess,” Beverly says.  “And indecisive.  He doubled back on himself a lot.  I don’t think he’s looking for a place to go to ground, he keeps moving.”

“Gideon,” Will says on an exhale.  Alana tenses; every eye in the room swings to her. 

Abel Gideon has a well-known fondness for Alana – the sort of fondness that promised violence even before the arena. 

“Hunting us?” Jack says.  “Or hunting someone else nearby?  Hannibal, what did you see?”

“Less than Beverly has already described,” Hannibal says.  “But I agree with Will’s conclusion; she is describing Abel Gideon.” 

“He’s hunting us,”  Will says.  “But something is throwing him off.  I don’t think it’s caution, prudence isn’t his style, it’s -”  He stops, eyes closing. 

“Lounds?” Hannibal suggests.

Will shakes his head.  “No, he doesn’t know she’s here – if he did, she’d side-track him alright, but one or the other of them would already be dead.  She won’t take him on if she doesn’t have to, and she doesn’t have to – she knows he’ll go after Alana, she’ll let that play out, pick off the survivors.  It’d be _smart_ of him to want to take her out first, but Gideon isn’t that smart.”

“He is not entirely foolish,” Hannibal counters.  “Do not mistake an unbalanced mind for a weak mind.”

Will scowls, eyes still shut.  “I’m not – Chilton,” he blurts, and _smiles_ – it’s bitter and vindicated and skin-crawling, that smile.  Alana, who had been riveted, looks away.  Jack leans closer; Jack is a hunter with a scent.

“That makes sense,” Beverly agrees, nodding. 

Hannibal considers, then says, “Yes.”

“Chilton is all . .  all ripe for the plucking,” Will says, sounding hungrily scornful in a way that Will would never sound. “It’s too good for Gideon to pass up, but he doesn’t want to take the time, he can’t decide.” 

“How long is he going to stay conflicted?” Jack pushes. 

“Not long,” Will says, nodding his head to one side, lips curling.  “Not with Alana so close.”

“Tonight?” Jack says.

“Maybe.”  Will shakes his head, frowning.  “No.  No, he’ll have been watching us today, he’ll know that we’ll be weaker in daylight, more spread out – half of us hunting.  He’ll want that.  He doesn’t want to take out the group, he wants _Alana,_ and he wants to be able to take his _time._ He’ll target the people he would expect to protect her first, so probably Hannibal, but she’s the only kill he cares about.  He’ll go after her last, if at all possible – he wouldn’t mind a chase.” 

Will stops, his breathing rapid and deep.  Then his eyes fly open and fix on Alana’s face.  He swallows hard, looking sick.  “I’m sorry.  I know that’s useless, but just – I’m sorry.”

“Perhaps something should be done about that,” Hannibal suggests mildly.

“About me being sorry?” Will snaps.

“Absolutely, yes,” Hannibal agrees without pause, “but I was referring to the unfortunately obsessive Mr Gideon.  Perhaps -”  His gaze swings to Alana.  “ – you and I should go hunting.  Besides elimating the threat that is Gideon, we might also make an impression upon  . . . Miss Lounds.” 

Alana looks instantly to Will, tense and trapped.

Will stares down at the floor. 

“That is not a bad idea,” Jack says.  “Take out Gideon tonight, we look strong, aggressive.  It'll clear the path to move tomorrow.”

_The_ path.  Not _a_ path.  Abigail stacks this in her mind, another brick in a growing shape, but she cannot yet see what is being built. 

“Will,” Alana says.

“I know what he’d do to you if he had the chance,” Will answers, voice low and ragged, head down.  “I can – I can _see_ it, how he’d -”  His voice strangles itself.

“So we do not give him that chance,” Hannibal presses. 

“We can afford to hold here for another night, if it’s to a purpose.” Jack nods along.  “It’s a good plan, and we need to take opportunities like this when they present themselves.”

The opportunity to kill Gideon – but there’s something else, something _else_ that he means.  Killing Gideon means something else.  Understanding dances, tauting, at the edge of Abigail’s thoughts. 

“Will,” Alana repeats softly.

Will looks up, directly into her eyes.  “I would never let him touch you.  I would take him _apart_ before I let him -”

“I know,” Alana says. 

“I should -”

“But you don’t have to,” she interrupts gently.  “It doesn’t have to be you, and it’s better if it’s me – he won’t be thinking clearly if it’s me.  It’s an advantage, and we need to press our advantages.  I just want to know you’ll be able to forgive me.”

_We_ need to press our advantages.  _We_ need to take opportunities _._

There is no _we_ in the arena. 

“You would even if I couldn’t,” Will says – a question.  But then, not questioning at all, he says, “You _should,_ even if I couldn’t.” 

“I should, and could, and would,” Alana assures him.  “That isn’t on your head, Will.  Not everything is.”

Abigail can hear him swallow.  “Enough things are.” 

“Too many things,” Alana agrees; Will chuckles darkly. 

“Yes,” Will says, and swallows again. “Always.  Anything.”

Alana is silent a moment; they’re all silent, watching this like it’s a play, but if either Will or Alana care, they give no indication.   

Alana leans forward and kisses the corner of Will’s mouth; he doesn’t move, doesn’t even breath.

“We’ll be quick,” she promises, and then stands – and in the span of that movement, she transforms.  Any hint of gentleness sloughs off like a shed skin.  “Hannibal?” she says, and without waiting for an answer, walks out the door.

Hannibal nods at Jack, who nods back, and then follows her. 

Will stands and walks past Jack to the window.  “You should sleep,” he says.


	8. Nightmares

This is Abigail’s first true night in this arena, the first night of which she is aware.

It’s not as cold as her first Games were, but it’s cold enough.  Maybe it’s her injuries, blood loss, who knows, but she huddles in her corner and shivers.  Beverly takes one side of the fire, curling around it such that she’d burn herself if she so much as twitched in her sleep, but so far as Abigail sees, she doesn’t.  Maybe she isn’t actually sleeping – but her breathing is even, and Abigail can’t tell.

Abigail can picture herself occupying the opposite half of that circle, and Hannibal curved around her like Bella had described -  like the rind on a slice of gourd, and she is the fragile flesh.  The image hovers, ghostly, until she can almost physically see it - fascinating, repellant.  She wants it; wants to crawl over into that space and slide into her place in that shape.  It would be so easy.  It would be _warm._

But Hannibal isn’t there, and Abigail can only be grateful, and queasy, and cold. 

The Crawfords fit themselves into the corner opposite Abigail; Jack sleeps with his pack strapped on and wedged in behind him, shoulders propped against the joining of two walls.  Bella lays with her head on his chest.  Her hair is braided tight around her head; he works a whisp of it free and twists it around his fingers.  She slaps his hand, but she smiles as she does it, and he smiles back.  He kisses the top of her head; she catches his hand and kisses his fingers.  His eyes close, his jaw set and hard; hers remain open, her hand holding his, her thumb playing across his knuckles.  His other arm wraps around her, his free hand sliding from her shoulder down to her elbow and then back up again, repeating, the motion hypnotic to Abigail’s eyes.

She wonders what that feels like – what it feels like to be Bella, who sinks into the embrace like she could drown in it.  While Jack’s hand stills after a while and the set of his jaw eventually loosens, Bella’s grip on his hand just gets tighter and tighter until a frown crosses his face.  He snorts and shifts in his sleep; Bella lets go, and unwraps herself.  She tucks the blanket up around his chest as she stands.  He turns into it; into the residual warmth?  Does he know, even in sleep, that she’s gone?  Abigail watches and catalogues and _absorbs._

She sees pain, and she sees peace, like oil and water.  No, like ice in a pipe, but she isn’t certain which is which – which expands, and which shatters. 

Bella wraps her hands around her elbows and shivers, rubs her own arms for warmth, and glides silent across the floor – to where Will stands, at the window.  Where he has stood for hours, staring outward, barely breathing.

“She’s a survivor,” Bella murmurs.

Will makes a small, dismissive noise.  “We’re all survivors.”

“No,” Bella says, “No, I don’t think that’s true.  I think some of us . . . just don’t know how to die.”

Will turns and looks at her.

“It’s like . . . death just forgot all about us,” Bella says, shrugging.  “Whether we really wanted it to or not.”

Will considers this.  Abigail’s feels like she’s been awake, just staring into the dark, for years – her eyes have adjusted so well that she can see Will blinking, repeatedly, as if he’s trying to bring Bella into focus.  As if he wasn’t really seeing her before.

“Yes,” he finally agrees.  “Yes, it’s like that.  It’s . . . like dissolving into your own shadow.”

“Jack is solid,” Bella says, with something between pride and a catch in her voice.  “And Alana is too.”

“The better for death to find them,” Will says bitterly.

Bella shakes her head.  “The better for them to fight it.”  She pauses.  “It makes me jealous, sometimes.  Jealous and angry and I hate that I feel that way.  But you can’t really help what you feel, can you?”

“No, you can’t,” Will agrees, shaking his head once in wry acknowledgment.  “Jack – Jack looks at me like I’m a the last match left in a pack.  It’s cold enough to kill and the kindling is wet and I am that last, soggy, crooked match.” 

Bella smiles, and looks down at her feet.  “That he does.” 

“I don’t know if I can be that,” Will confesses. 

“And I know I cannot do a damned thing to change how Jack sees the world,” Bella answers, not ungently.  “Nor would I if I could.”

Will smiles back at this, shaking his head – agreement, denial, a bit of both, the motion isn’t certain.  “And, I shouldn’t ask you.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” Bella agrees – but still kindly.  “You could ask her, though.”  Will looks up.  “Not in regard to Jack,” Bella clarifies.

“I understood that,” Will grumbles, and fixes his eyes on a point somewhere past Bella’s shoulder.  “But I can’t – she says I give her _hope._ ”

“And you never meant to be that cruel,” Bella answers.

“I can’t – I cannot be that last match,” Will insists.  “I don’t know if I’ll catch.  I don’t know that.  It’s Hannibal -”

“I believe Hannibal would be the wet kindling, in this metaphor,” Bella interjects. 

“I’m going to burn him up?” Will snaps.

“I think that’s enough,” Bella says – calmly, but warningly.  There it is again; that shape on the edge of Abigail’s understanding.  Stop talking about it, Bella tells Will, but without saying what it is, what he should stop saying, who can’t be allowed to hear.  What are they planning to burn?  “Hannibal’s a survivor too.”

“Not like Jack or Alana – or Beverly, her too,” Will objects.  “He’s -”  He shakes his head.

“I think death might well be scared of Hannibal Lecter.” Bella’s lips twist up in something that’s a bit too brittle to be a smile.  She catches Will’s hand, squeezes it; he stares like he has no idea what she’s doing, and she lets go, her smile going soft and sad.  “You should get some rest,” she says – rest, not sleep.  She knows better.

“I can’t,” he says – like a litany, a chorus, return to coda, it’s all Will Graham is capable of saying.  And it’s a lie. 

“I know,” Bella says, walks away,  and goes to lie down next to Jack again.  She doesn’t lift the blanket, doesn’t disturb him.  She just curls into his side, uncovered despite the cold, and rests her head on his shoulder. 

Will keeps watch at the window.

***

The canon sounds.

It is somewhere out in the dark, lost, and Abigail is wandering through shadows that aren’t quite consciousness, time stretched gossamer thin and sticky like spider webs. 

Beverly sits up and twists around – she is a fall of dark hair and pale arms that don’t move the way they should, that skitter like the legs of insects, and Will, if she squints a bit, is on fire. 

Her neck is gaping open again, but it doesn’t hurt.  The blood is just warmth running down her chest.  It’s sort of nice.  Her hands are so cold they’re going numb.

“Will?” Beverly says, and it reverberates; for a second she is person-shaped.  The moonlight coming in the window is liquid, impossibly bright. 

Then the spiderweb darkness catches her again, wraps her tight and lifts her up until she is weightless, and something is a there at her neck, its fingers sharp and cold.

***

She wakes to the smell of far too much smoke.  A hand is crushing her shoulder and shaking. 

“Up, now!” Beverly shouts in Abigail’s face, and doesn’t really wait for Abigail to comply before letting go of her shoulder, grabbing her hand, and dragging her toward the door.

Abigail lurches after her, coughing and choking on the ash in the air and the rancid chemical smell of gas.  They spill into the hallway; the smoke is thicker there, the open door at the end of it a square of hazy orange light.  The fire is _outside,_ coming in at them, not the other way around.  The three figures in the doorway are reduced to blurry shapes and colors, the impression of motion.   Will is shaking; even through the smoke, Abigail can see that.  Her eyes burn and run.  It’s getting hotter much, much too quickly. 

 As soon as Jack sees them coming, he throws Will through the door into the street.  Bella follows, lithe as a column of smoke herself, the shotgun slung over her shoulder.  Jack waits, shoves Beverly out the door, then Abigail, then himself. 

Outside, the world is on fire and roaring.  Flames lick the end of the alley and climb, crawling up walls, pouring in windows and out again, flooding toward them. 

“Will!” Jack bellows. 

Will is standing in one spot, eyes screwed shut, hands over his ears.  Abigail can see his lips moving. 

“We have to _go!_ ” Bella shouts, and grabs Jack’s arm. 

“ _Will!_ ” Beverly screams.  “Will, come on!”

Abigail can make out the words Will is muttering.  He is saying, _where where wherewhereWHERE –_

She flies the two steps it takes her to reach him and rip his hands away from the sides of his head.  His eyes focus on her, bloodshot and frantic.  “Where?” she shrieks, digging her nails into his wrists.  “Guess!  Now!”

“East.  Bridge,” he blurts.  “Alana -” 

“She’ll be at the bridge!” Abigail yells; he just stares at her, shaking, eyes darting to and from her face like he’s dreaming.  She doesn’t know where there is a bridge, she doesn’t know _if_ there is a bridge – but she knows that the flames are to either side of them.  In the space of the next three, maybe four heartbeats, they will be ahead of them, and then some of them, maybe all of them, are going to die.  “Will – Hannibal will be at the bridge!  He’ll know!” 

All she knows it that they’ll be running blind without him, but Will – Will can see, this is what Will does, and he needs to start doing it, right _now_.

 “He’ll know,” Will repeats, and begins to nod his head, quicker and quicker, convulsive.  “He’ll know, he’ll be at the bridge, she’ll -”

“Go!” Abigail screams.  The air is so hot that breathing burns. 

Will’s wrist turns in her grasp.  He catches her, pulls her after him.  They run. 

***


	9. Flames

The birds outpace them first, great clouds of them - all kinds flocked together, wheeling overhead. 

For the span of a few a blocks they run apace with a pack of feral dogs, but the dogs are quicker, and leave them behind. 

When they have put more than heartbeats, more than ragged breaths between themselves and the wall of flame, Will stops, eyes darting,  muttering.  Then he stills, fixed on the building beside them.

“I _see_ you,” he murmurs.

Then he blinks the rest of them back into focus, still and panting and waiting.  He shakes his head frantically, lurching toward Jack, who is closest to the building.  “No, you’re too  -”

There is a hiss and a pop like fireworks and the building goes up, so fast the windows shatter and spit glass down on them. 

Abigail hears Jack grunt and swear, but there’s no time to figure out why.

***

“It’s a grid,” Will mutters.  “It’s a grid, the old gas lines, there’s a pattern – it’s not random, I’m controlling this, every inch of it is my design -”

They’ve managed to get a few streets ahead of the flames again, though the smoke is closer, burning in Abigail’s lungs and her eyes and crawling its way up the back of her throat into her skull.  Will stands in the center of the intersection of two cracked, crumbling roads, ash raining down on them.  His eyes are closed; his free hand moves across the space in front of him like he’s tracing something on a map.

They’ve been going due East, more or less, but the fire has forced them off course by several blocks now – off the course Will intended, which they are all trusting. 

Jack’s sleeve has soaked through with red.  The slice across his temple drips into his eye.  The right side of his face is a dark smear, blood and ash, where he keeps wiping it away.  Bella has a few spots of red across her left shoulder; her hair glitters with tiny shards of glass.  She was a few inches to the side of the window when it blew; Jack wasn’t. 

His pack – handed off to Bella, now, and bristling like a porcupine  – protected most of his back, but not his shoulders.  A fragment of glass protrudes from the right, and his arm hangs limp, fingers loosely curled – he clutches it to his stomach with his other hand when he runs.  No one has said a word; the piece of glass is large, and must be deeply embedded, and right now, with it left there, the bleeding isn’t deadly.   

Bella’s face is finely etched stone; she still carries the shotgun. 

If Jack dies, Abigail wonders if Bella will turn that gun on all of them, first, or only herself.  It’s a calm, dispassionate thought; there isn’t much room left in Abigail’s brain for things other than her own pain.

 “ – I want _maximum_ visual impact,” Will says, the words vicious with an undertone of something Abigail might call lust.  “An inferno, at my command.”

“Well, if that’s what they want, I’d say they’ve achieved it,” Bella says, with even less emotion than Abigail feels.  The shotgun is cocked and ready in her hands; they’ve encountered no other tributes yet, but they’re easy targets, if someone is insane enough to be hunting now. 

It’s the sort of insanity the Games cultivate; the sort of insanity that wins Games.  If Abigail could think, she could remember if any of the victors in the arena with them now had weaponized an obstacle to their own advantage, in their Games.

But Abigail can’t think; Abigail can barely stand, Will’s hand still wrapped around her wrist, crushing.  She expects bruises.  She is grateful for the distraction of this lesser pain. 

“I need them to see that my control is absolute, my power infinite.  But this – this isn’t all,” Will murmurs.  “There’s something – something else I need to show them, something I’m driving them towards – this is the _backdrop,_ this is _context_ for -”   His voice fades.

Abigail’s leg is one over-long pause away from giving out.  Pain runs like a live wires from the re-opened gash down to the top of her foot, up to the inside of her thigh.  If she just keeps going, then it’s just pain, she can tolerate it, the leg still _functions._ If they hold still too long, though, the adrenaline will ebb and her muscles will lock and she’ll start to feel the toll of the steady, warm drip running down her ankle. 

Beverly is the only one of them left truly whole; Jack’s pain cripples Bella as surely as it does him, makes her brittle – makes her dangerous, but easily shattered.  Like sharp glass. 

Will – Will was never unwounded.  The thought of him as a child flits through Abigail’s mind – a thin, grim child.  She cannot imagine him any other way.

“Which way, Will?” Jack says – his voice low and careful and dire.  It does not shake, does not waver, but his face is going sickly and grey.  He takes a step closer to Will, and stops, and grabs his useless arm, holding it immobile at his side before he moves again.  “That’s all we need right now.  Which way to this bridge?”

“Quicker would be better,” Bella adds, eyes on the flames that follow them in uneven lurches, crawling forward, then leaping. 

Some scrawny, thin-furred thing that might be a coyote jumps out of one the broken windows of the building across the street and dashes across the intersection between Jack and Beverly, nearly brushing Beverly’s leg.  It leaps into another empty window on the other side. 

“Fuck the bridge,” Beverly says sharply.  “Which way isn’t going to explode?”   

“It doesn’t matter,” Will say, blinking, turning to squint at her.  “He doesn’t want us dead, not all of us, anyway.  It’s too soon for that, there’s something he still needs to show us – to show Panem.” 

“So it doesn’t matter which way we run?” Beverly says incredulously. 

“In another minute, no it does not,” Bella says, eyes still locked on the flames roaring out over the rooftops, closer than they’d been just seconds ago.

Will is shaking his head.  “That’s only what he thinks, what he _wants_ to think, but fire isn’t -”

Three deer come flying out the smoke-filled street behind them and into the crossroads, all young bucks with downy stubs of antlers.  One has a rear leg dangling at an odd angle, and it crashes forward drunkenly. 

Abigail scrambles out of its way, dragging Will with her.

“No one really controls a fire,” Will says, eyes on the deer as it falters, scrabbles to get its feet back under it, and turns sharply right into the first available alley.  Will swallows, and starts nodding, slowly, then faster. 

“Will?” Jack demands; there is a rusty, crumbling edge to his voice. 

Will points after the deer.  “There.  We go through there.”

***

Jack’s legs give out before Abigail’s does.

Beverly reaches for him as he crumples, and Bella has the shotgun up in the space of a breath, inches from Beverly’s forhead.  Beverly’s hands shoot into the air.

“I’m helping!” she shouts.  “Let me help him!”

They’ve lost the blocks they had between themselves and the fire.  Jack kneels, panting, eyes glassy.  He tries to push himself back up, and doubles over. 

“You can’t carry him yourself, and you really can’t carry him and that gun!” Beverly argues. 

Bella doesn’t move, her face empty and her eyes gone feral. 

Will’s fingers threaten to break Abigail’s wrist in half.  “Bella,” he says.  “Bella, you have to trust -”

“I do not have to do a damn thing,” Bella says, low and even. 

“Go,” Jack growls, his face still half-way to the ground.  “Get out of here, you don’t have the time.”

“ _Fuck_ that,” Bella snaps.

“Helping,” Beverly repeats, inching toward Jack again, making sure Bella can see her empty hands, making sure she moves slowly.

The fire is not so polite; Abigail can feel the heat climbing again at her back, like the breath of some enormous, infinitely hungry beast. 

Will lets go of Abigail’s wrist and moves toward them.  He reaches out and puts his hand on the barrel of the gun.  His fingers close around it.  Bella lets him.

Beverly lifts Jack’s bad arm.

Jack screams, ragged and inhuman; Will jerks the barrel of the gun up, away from Beverly, but Bella’s hands just go slack, and he takes it from her.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Beverly is muttering, as she slings Jack’s arm across her shoulder.  “I’m sorry.” 

Bella folds to her knees in front of him, grabs his jaw in both hands, and lifts his face.  Jack is pliant in her fingers, swaying to one side; Beverly pauses, down on one knee and bearing half of Jack’s weight.

“You are not allowed to die,” Bella snarls.  “Do you hear me?  I will not forgive you for this.  Don’t you leave me.” 

“Trying not to,” he says; the words slur. 

***

It helps, giving up; they are slow and unwieldy and she isn’t certain anymore that Will is really all there.  She knows Bella isn’t.  Jack is half dead already, and Beverly – she’s not sure if it’s just something in the other woman’s personality, or genuine friendship, or guilt over the loss of Zeller, but it is abundantly clear that Beverly is not going to leave them behind. 

Abigail doesn’t know if she would, if her leg wasn’t becoming heavier and less her own with every step; if she didn’t believe that Will was her only way back to Hannibal, and Hannibal her only decent chance of survival.  He sewed her back together once; he can do it again.

She isn’t thinking clearly.  She knows it.  The smoke is starting to make things hazy in more ways than one.  She knows the signs of oxygen deprivation.

Abigail accepts that they are going to die; it is what lets her keep going, when her entire body is screaming that she is doing irreparable damage, that she can’t do this, that it’s time to curl up and be done.

It doesn’t matter; none of it matters, except that she keep trying.  That she never give up, never panic, never give in to the instinctive _need_ to respect pain over logic, to preserve herself in the moment rather than the long game.  She isn’t an animal.  They won’t make her an animal.

***

And then they are at the river.  There is Will’s bridge, arching into the blackened sky. 

Abigail blinks up at it, breathes in the rush of comparatively clear air sweeping in off the water where nothing is burning, and is flooded with a sensation she cannot name.

Oxygen, the logical part of her brain supplies. 

It doesn’t feel logical.  It feels like a miracle, like the world has tilted sideways and everything has fallen into a new shape. 

There is the bridge. 

“Where are they?” Will demands, his voice breaking.  “Why aren’t they here?”

The bridge is a gargantuan spiderweb of steel suspension cables, its surface pitted and uneven but solid.  Vines and brambles climb the first upward slope of it, but beyond that, there is nothing to burn. 

Jack is all but unconscious, barely managing to lift his feet as Bella and Beverly drag him forward.  He’s moaning almost continously; Abigail doubts he’s even aware of it.  Will scrambles toward the apex of the bridge, stomping fitfully from side to side as he goes, searching down over the edges.   They follow, more slowly.

Abigail’s epiphany has done nothing for the solidity of her leg, but she can see the sense in getting as high as they can.  Unless one of the other tributes has some far more advanced weaponry than what she’s seen so far, they’ll be safe up there, and have a view that will span miles. 

“Where are they?” Will says again, mournful and lost, at the bridge’s uppermost arch. 

“I’m done,” Beverly says, to Bella, talking over Jack’s head.  “Here, okay?  On his stomach?”  And they lower Jack carefully down. 

Abigail is staring off down the river.

The view is all but obliterated by the smoke, but not quite – she thinks of Will’s Gamemaker, the one in Will’s head, or is it the other way around?  It doesn’t matter.  That this was orchestrated is obvious.

Abigail limps and stumbles her way to the railing, falls on it.  Stares. 

Will stops his pacing when he sees where her eyes have gone.  He laughs, bitter and broken.  “You see?”  He looks up at the empty, ashen sky.  “There!” he shouts.  “Happy now?  Is it _everything_ you hoped it would be?”

Abigail can see two shapes off in the distance – in the middle of the river, she thinks, on an island in the river. 

“I mean, it’s not bad,” Will continues his one-sided conversation.  “ _Very_ dramatic.  You didn’t count on there being so much smoke, though, did you?  It’s ruining your shot.”

No – no, it’s not.  It’s clear enough. 

Two shapes like gourds with their tops cut off, huge and pale, rising out of the river.  She’s seen those before, in schoolbooks, in the videos they play before the reaping.  Power plants, but not like the ones at home.

Nuclear power.

She knows where they are now – why the arena is so vast, why they have guns, why the city had to burn.  Why they were herded like animals ( _you can never let them, NEVER!_ ) to this point. 

This was District 13.


End file.
